alt Hacker NewsHi, I'm the author of the article.
As to your hard disagree, I guess it depends... While this particular user is on the higher end (in terms of columns), it's not our only user where column counts are huge. We see tables with 100+ columns on a fairly regular basis especially when dealing with larger enterprises.
Can you clarify which knowledge domains those enterprises fall under with examples of what problems they were trying to solve?
If it's not obvious, I agree with the hard disagree. Every time I see a table with that many columns, I have a hard time believing there isn't some normalization possible.
Schemas that stubbornly stick to high-level concepts and refuse to dig into the subfeatures of the data are often seen from inexperienced devs or dysfunctional/disorganized places too inflexible to care much. This isn't really negotiable. There will be issues with such a schema if it's meant to scale up or be migrated or maintained long term.